


High Flight

by RoseAndPsyche



Category: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Genre: Gen, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-24 00:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2560766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseAndPsyche/pseuds/RoseAndPsyche
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young war correspondent strong-arms an Air Marshall into letting her go on a bombing run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dusk

. 1943 .

A deep red glow lit the sky as the sun slipped below the horizon. Huge black forms were silhouetted by the sky; Stirling bombers, their bellies full of high explosives. She’d seen the bombs herself, earlier; huge things, smooth and so deadly.

Titty shifted her camera to the other hand and half wondered if she’d made a mistake…no, she couldn’t think about it, not now. The brilliant sky brought to mind orange lilies and quite suddenly, she thought of _Crossing the Bar_ by Tennyson. _Why_ , did she have to think of that? Yet the words ran through her head, inexorably… _Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark-”_

“You can still change your mind, ma’am.”

Titty turned to see Pilot Officer Williams standing next to her. He was the copilot of one of those dark Stirlings out there on the landing strip. She shivered.

“No,” She said quietly, “I’m not changing my mind.”

She hugged the camera to herself. It was a large thing, bulky, and she knew every quirk and detail of it. It was wrapped in sheepskin…it would need it at twenty thousand feet.

“Where are we going?” she asked suddenly, just gathering her courage.

“Hamburg,” he grinned at her. “Can’t promise any sight-seeing, however. Coffee shops and things will all be closed by the time we get there.”

Titty laughed and shook her head. She couldn’t help thinking how much he reminded her of her brother, Roger.    

“I hope that thingamabob takes good pictures in the dark,” Pilot Officer Williams added a moment later.

“It will,” Titty said. Dark? No in the dark it wouldn’t, she had the highest ISO film she could get her hands on, but there would be a full moon and when they arrived, she had been assured, there would be the geysers of ack ack, the crisscrossing beams of search lights and the burning explosions in the dark. Light? There would be plenty of light.

Titty shook herself. “I hope we can take off before it gets completely dark, I wanted some pictures of the bombers in formation. Do you think it will be light by the time we come back?”

“Dawn at least,” he said, “Has anyone given you a parachute?”

“No.”

“That needs remedying,” he patted her on the arm. “I’ll be back.”

She watched him jog away; they all seemed to be full over with energy. She wandered a little closer to the nearest Stirling and saw that they were just jacking the last bomb up into the bomb bay. Somebody glanced over at her and grinned. She smiled back and suddenly felt better. _They_ weren’t afraid; she wouldn’t be either.

A short fellow, stocky, tipped his cap at her.

“What are you?” She asked, her journalist nature getting the better of her.

“Pardon?”

“Sorry, what do you do on the bomber?”

“I’m tail-end-Charlie,” he said. “I man the guns at the very back.”

He gestured towards the rear of the plane; the towering tail seemed like a very long ways away from where they stood. Four massive engines took up the air above her head, the huge props black against the sky. Everything was huge. Big white letters on the nose of the plane said, “ _The Bulldog_ ,” and a colorful painting of the same with large teeth and a spiky collar snarled at her from the black paint scheme. The British weren’t big on nose art, but this would have rivaled even the loudest American work. Twelve carefully painted white bombs on the nose showed the number of missions _The Bulldog_ had flown.   

The Flight Engineer was just dropping down from the wing after inspecting one of the engines. A moment later, Squadron Leader Alden himself, the captain of the bomber, walked past, his yellow Mae West glowing in the setting sun, his parachute over his shoulder.

“Miss Walker,” he said extending his hand. “I’m glad to see you again.”

“Thank you,” Titty said, shaking the hand.

“Might want to skip back a step, we’ll be starting the engines.”

“Yes of course.”

She moved back. She was getting hot. The heavy boots and flight jacket she had borrowed were weighing her down.

“Life jacket and parachute,” she looked around to see Pilot Officer Williams. “You don’t have to put them on, though you might want the Mae West. Just put the parachute somewhere it’s not in the way. Did they give you a crash course just in case we have to bail out?”

“Yes,” Titty said, though she’d already forgotten most of it.

Above them, the props on one of the huge Bristol engines began to turn laboriously…then another. With a sudden cough and a billow of smoke, the engine roared into life followed in turn by the others. The yellow tips on the props painted brilliant yellow circles in the dusky air.

All over the field, the Stirlings were erupting into life, their engines settling into a deep thunderous hum. The ground was shaking under Titty’s feet and she hurriedly snapped a picture of all those whirling propellers against the glowing sky.

“Right-o,” Pilot Officer Williams said, taking her elbow. “Let’s get aboard. I’ll take the camera.”

There was a door on the side of _The Bulldog_ and Titty found herself climbing the ladder and stepping into the near darkness in the narrow, ribbed fuselage of the bomber. Looking ahead, she could see the sunset through the distant windscreen. There was the deep hum of the engines and the whole plane vibrated.

The seven men who clambered in after her went to their various places; the Squadron Leader was already at the controls; Pilot Officer Williams handed her the camera and clambered forward to join him. Tail-end-Charlie went aft, the navigator squeezed in at his tiny table. The bombardier took his place below the pilots in the Plexiglas nose and the wireless operator took his seat behind the pilots. Titty felt herself propelled toward the seat next to the wireless operator.

“Just you sit yourself down there, darling,” the Engineer said. “Buckle in, dear.”

“But isn’t this your seat?”

“It’s yours this time around, my girl.”

She buckled in and clutched her camera. She was under the Plexiglas observation deck and she had a beautiful view of the airfield, the sky and the whirling propellers. Quickly she snapped a picture.

“Hello crew, skipper here,” the drawling voice of Squadron Leader Alden came in her headset, “all aboard and ready to roll?”

A chorus of, “yes sir!” rang in her headset.

“Hello photographer, doing all right there?”

“Roger,” she said bravely and everyone laughed.

“O.K. boys.”

The plane shuddered and Titty saw between the pilot and copilot’s heads that someone with red flags was waving them forward. The engines roared louder and as the plane moved forward; she saw the airstrip, lit with red flares flickering in the dusk. The engineer was bracing himself between her seat and the wireless operator’s.

The flags waved and _The Bulldog_ swung around, props whirling. She was moving down the runway, slowly at first then gaining speed. It was frightfully bumpy, then suddenly, there was lift and the ground was moving away beneath them. Titty clung to her camera. She had flown once, a long time ago in Egypt when her brother Roger had taken her up in his airplane he had put together from spare parts. It had been wonderful…this was wonderful too.

The Stirling banked farther and farther and the airfield below them slanted at a dizzying angle through the glass side panels. Titty raised the camera and snapped a shot of all the bombers, tens of them, lined up and ready to fly. There were more taking off, one by one in a long line behind _The_ _Bulldog_. They fell into formation, nose to tail, wingtip to wingtip, so close it was frightening. Titty brought her camera to bear, balancing it on her knee. Up here, they could still see the brilliance from the sun on the horizon behind them and the black painted bombers were bathed in golden light.

Around her, Titty saw the crew getting out of their seats. The engineer had climbed up into the turret above them and the bombardier was fiddling with the machine guns in the nose.

“Hello crew, test your weapons; fire at will.” Then added, probably for her benefit, “We’re at ten thousand, probably should put on your oxygen.”

Titty glanced around, wondering if they were firing already; she couldn’t tell over the roar of the engines. Then the whole plane shuddered violently and she heard the rattling bang of browning machine guns. Spent brass casings danced down from the turret, still steaming. She reached out and picked one up, a souvenir. She could feel the heat from it sinking through her glove. Below her, she could hear the bombardier having a go with the nose guns, and she knew tail-end-Charlie was testing his. Then the racket and vibrating stopped and the bomber was flying smoothly. Titty fumbled for her oxygen mask and put it over her face. She nearly choked with the fumes of black rubber.

There was something almost spiritual about that sunset. They were flying away from the sun, but the slanting rays streaked through the cabin and lit the clouds pink. Above the clouds, the sky stretched deep blue, spangled with stars glittering at them like a million guardian angles. The fifteen miles to the coast passed and their shadow streaked over silent green fields. Then the rolling waves of the North Sea glittered below them and looking back, Titty saw the sun, lowering behind the white cliffs and casting a long golden path across the water to France.

The Stirlings hung in the sky in formation, their engines humming like a giant orchestra. The red paint of their identification numbers burnt scarlet against their black paint schemes. She could see the very faces of the crew of the bomber next to them.

She looked down again, past the whirring propellers of the engine next to the window. She saw the tiny black shadow of the plane streaking across the stretching silver water. It was the North Sea. She’d never flown across it before, but in 1931, she’d sailed across it when she, her sister and her two brothers had accidently drifted out to sea in a fog in a twenty-five foot Bermuda cutter. The silent water 20,000 feet below them looked far different from the crashing waves she remembered so vividly.

The sun was sinking ever lower and the darkness of the sky deepened, stretching to the glow on the horizon. To the right, Titty caught sight of the moon – a bomber’s moon – and brilliant. In its silver light, she could see the other bombers clearly, but she knew that the Luftwaffe would see them just as clearly. 

* * *

 

**To Be Continued...**

 


	2. Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Titty over Hamburg.

. Night .

Hours wore by as the engines droned on and _The Bulldog_ vibrated with the noise. Titty had gotten out of her seat to see the silver sea give way to land. A picture had been taken and she was sure she had gotten one of the bombers a layer below them, streaking along, bathed in moonlight and small as a plaything.

“Hello crew, skipper here, everything O.K.?”

Titty hadn’t realized that she had been dozing. Jerking herself awake, she looked around. _That will never do!_ Fumblingly, she raised the camera and took a shot forward, through the windscreen, of the bomber ahead of them, the _only_ bomber ahead of them, silhouetted by the coldly burning moon.

“Everything corking, sir.” The Engineers’ big, pleasant voice answered for all of them.

“Hello engineer, skipper here,” Squadron Leader Alden said. “Will you put the revs up, please?”

“Yes sir.”

“Here comes Jerry.”

A moment later, all the guns erupted, shaking the bomber like an earthquake. Titty gasped, looking forward and could just see something dark ghosting for them at a blinding speed. Sparks of fire ripped through the air outside as the shadowy form of a fighter roared over the glass canopy overhead.

“O.K. Boys?” Squadron Leader Alden asked, his voice as calm as if the bullets that had just streamed towards them were nothing more dangerous than raindrops on a summer day.

“I think I got him! I think I got him!” Tail-end-Charlie’s voice broke excited in Titty’s headset.

“Is he going down, tail-gunner?” the Squadron Leader inquired. “Hello mid-gunner, can you identify him?”

“I didn’t recognize him, but he’s definitely going down.”

“All right, I see some more fighter planes, boys,” Squadron Leader Alden continued. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

Titty clenched. She didn’t realize she’d done it until her jaw began to ache. Her eyes were riveted on the patch of star sprinkled sky just over the Pilot Officer William’s shoulder. She could see them now. They were German fighters coming down to pounce like wolves pouncing on a heard of slow moving cattle. Like wolves they circled and worried until they could force one from the herd and bring it down. The guns roared, beating at her eardrums. She was shaking; she wasn’t sure if it was the vibrations or just cold terror.

Down below in the clear glass sky, she saw a bomber waver, then swerve as a fireball of flame enveloped a wing. Slowly, magnificently, it tipped like a sinking ship and screamed down, plummeting towards earth. She stared after it, her eyes wide and unblinking. She had forgotten to blink.

Tiny puffs of white streamed away from the stricken bomber, she counted them; one…two…three…four…and there were no more. Her heart pinched.

It seemed like hours before the guns were silent.

“O.K. Boys?” Squadron Leader Alden asked. “Any damage?”

“Everything looks all right,” the Engineer said. “My gauges are steady.”

“Tail gunner?”

“O.K.” Tail-end Charlie’s voice crackled into the headset. “I think I winged one.”

“Good man.”

“Hello Skipper?”

“Hello Navigator.”

“Half a minute to go.”

“O.K.”

“Hello photographer,” the skipper’s voice was for her this time.

“Hello?” Titty’s voice was very thin. She willed it not to waver.

“We’re fairly near our goal now,” the skipper said. “Things might get a little hairy. Just sit tight, remember, there is armor under your seat.”  

Things were going to get hairy? Titty flinched and wondered if she could stand anymore. She stared over Pilot Officer William’s shoulder, into the blackness. There was no city down there…there couldn’t be. That black expanse seemed as empty as the sea.

Then something burst like a star flare just ahead of them, then another. She heard a rattle like hail against the fuselage and knew it was shrapnel. Below them, where no city was, powerful searchlights were switching on and crisscrossing like far-seeing eyes, hunting them down. She could see a glow of light from the engines of the lead bomber and below, she finally saw the city, outlined in moonlight and sparks of fire, as if it were a city of flames, not stones.

There was light everywhere, just as she knew there would be. Her hands shook so terribly she could barely unfasten her belt, but she did it anyway, scrambling to one of the open machinegun ports on a bottle of portable oxygen. The camera weighed her down like a millstone, but summoning every ounce of strength, she swung it up and began to photograph for all she was worth. There were silhouettes everywhere, like eagles winging over the flaming city. Titty didn’t think; she couldn’t, she was numb, her fingers seemed glued to her camera, automatically winding the film, adjusting the shutter speed, setting the aperture. She snapped picture after picture, barely hearing the click of the shutter beneath the roar of the engines and the rattling boom of the guns.

“Bomb doors open!”

The voice of the Bombardier brought her back to reality. She was there, trapped in a tiny metal tube over a flaming city with seven men who had done it twelve times before.

“O.K. Bombardier, ready when you are.”

“Bombs going in a minute-”

Suddenly bright heat was all around them, a sheet of fire. Titty felt herself lifted off her feet and hurled into space; her eardrums burst. The camera was ripped from her hands.

She landed on her back on hard metal. There was glass everywhere…trailing wires. Cold air was screaming into the fuselage. She struggled to sit up, but pain shot through her. Out of her blurred eyes, she saw the Squadron Leader hanging out of his seat, half resting on the floor. The glass was gone, only the twisted metal frame of the nose was left. She vaguely wondered where her camera was.

The Engineer was struggling towards the nose, one arm hanging useless by his side. If he was talking, she couldn’t hear him. He reached around Pilot Officer Williams and got a hand on the yoke. The Pilot Officer was hunched over it, hauling on it with all his might.

Slowly, it came over Titty that she was sliding across the floor, down towards the mangled nose. She saw the whole city stretching like a panorama below her, outlined with sparks of fire as _The Bulldog_ plummeted through the flaming layers of anti-aircraft fire. Titty had to close her eyes, not because she was afraid, but because of the terrible cold wind that tore through the plane. Her cheek was against the metal.

It seemed at that moment that dying was perfectly all right. She welcomed it. She wanted to urge it on and wondered why the Engineer and Pilot Officer were struggling so hard to keep them alive. As she lay there, it seemed that the darkness gave way to whiteness, to a blue sky over a pebbled beach, to a small green island in the middle of a lake, to hills that rose with majestic dignity into the sky.

She was there…she was sure she was there. She was bathing her feet in the water, looking down through the clear surface to find gems on the sand below. In a moment, Susan would tell her it was time for tea.

Then she opened her eyes.

The city was gone; the plane was still flying; the wind was not as strong as it had been and someone was speaking to her.

“You’ll be all right, darling…just look at me. That’s right. What hurts?”

Nothing hurt. Not if she didn’t move.

“Have we crashed?” she whispered.

“You’re going to have to speak up.”

“Have we crashed?” she yelled. The effort drained her.

“Not yet.”

He patted her shoulder. She gasped when pain ripped through her.

She wasn’t sure how much time had gone by, but when she looked past Pilot Officer Williams’ bloody shoulder, she saw that the sky was gray and pink, pale and shining. There were holes punched in the fuselage everywhere and bits of light shined through them. When she looked the other way, she saw the Squadron Leader lying next to her. His eyes were closed.

Was he dead?

She fancied she saw his chest moving.

The next time she saw the Engineer, he was attempting to crank the landing gear down with one hand. The Bombardier had joined Pilot Officer Williams in holding the plane on course and she watched the engineer, wishing she could help. The hydraulic lines must have been cut through. Presently one of the waist gunners took over and the Engineer came over to see if the two casualties on the floor were still alive.

“Has anyone fired the flares?” Pilot Officer Williams called, his voice weak.

“Someone fire the flares!” the Bombardier yelled. “The field needs to know we’re in distress.”

It seemed forever before they landed. They kept circling; she could see the field slanting through the shattered nose. Bombers were lined up everywhere again. She could see people running, others were on bicycles, others in cars. There was a little white ambulance streaking across the runway.

At last the landing strip was lining up in front of them; _The Bulldog_ was dropping slowly down. Titty could see Pilot Officer Williams’ shoulders quivering as he held the yoke steady. She felt more than heard the shriek of wheels touching tarmac, bounce and touch again.

They were on the ground.

~o*o~

The first person who came to see her was Nancy.

“I thought _I_ was the crazy one,” she said when she walked through the door.

“I took lessons from an expert,” Titty replied tiredly from the hospital bed.

Nancy laughed, “How are you feeling?” then paused. “Gosh…I wish it had been me.”

“You’re an air raid warden, you’ve seen it all from the ground,” Titty replied. “I think it must be ten times worse in the sky. You can’t run away. Is the Squadron Leader all right?”

“I asked. I thought you’d want to know,” Nancy replied. “He’ll live, but he’ll never fly again.”

“It can happen so quickly,” Titty said softly. “Everything was going perfectly, then it wasn’t.”

“I know,” Nancy shivered.

“Were the pictures a complete loss?”

“The camera was smashed up pretty well,” Nancy said. “But they were able to get the film out and develop it. I saw some of them…I can’t imagine…”

“Then it was worth it,” Titty said quietly and she barely heard Nancy as she continued to talk.

“A great deal of people are up in arms, wondering who to blame for letting you go up. How in the world did you convince someone to let you go...?”

Titty was thinking about something entirely different. In one night, her view of life had changed. In one night, she had nearly died. In one night, she had tasted of death, and seen the fragile hold life had. Slowly, her lips moved, though no sound came out, _For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar._

“Pardon?” Nancy asked. “You were saying something?”

“Nothing,” Titty replied. “Nothing at all.”

* * *

Finis

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there’s the end of it. It sort of went out with a pathetic gasp, rather than a triumphant bang, but oh well. I do have a few other S&A stories planned, which I probably will write at some point. Don’t expect them soon, however, because winter is pretty much upon us and I have an illness that gets worse in cold weather and I live in a particularly cold part of the world. I used to laugh when reading ‘Winter Holiday’ because that lake only froze over once every few life-times. Our lake, which is approximately the same depth as Lake Coniston, freezes so solidly every year, you could drive a semi towing a house over it and it wouldn’t budge. Our town uses snowplows to clear bits of it for ice sailing. I’ve been out on it once, when the wind chill factor was probably twenty or thirty below (that’s Fahrenheit, by the way); the stresses on the ice had fractured it, leaving huge ravines that went down through several feet of white ice to the black water below. I was expecting penguins at any moment.

**Author's Note:**

> This story started out laudably enough when I was young and foolish and didn’t know anything about Anything in Particular. That’s not to say I’m not still Young and Foolish, but I think I’m not as young and foolish as I was then. I meant to post this a year or so ago, but realized in time that I’d made a muddle out of it. I originally made the bombers Lancasters, but it came to me that British bomber crews were seven vs the American nine. So I switched the Lancasters to the bigger Stirlings, which had a crew of eight, but I’m still not sure if I have it right, and short of actually rewriting it (which I really don’t want to) I’m leaving it the way it is. It’s based on the story of Margaret Bourke-White, photographer for Life Magazine, who convinced Jimmy Doolittle to let her go on a bombing run with The Twelfth Air Force in Algeria. This is dedicated to her…and to Eve Curie, who almost won the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in 1944 (her family had high standards). Hope you enjoy!


End file.
